The DiggBar Strikes Again

When it comes to the DiggBar, Digg just can’t seem to get it right. As regular readers may remember, I first wrote a post about the DiggBar back in April. The reason that the post was titled “Is It Time for SEOs to Say Goodbye to Digg” was because Digg was keeping all of the traffic generated by content in the Digg ecosystem.

As many people predicted, this decision by Digg caused quite a backlash from website owners (many of who were actually blocking the service) and Digg users. As a result, Digg decided to change how the DiggBar worked. They announced that if someone wasn’t logged into Digg, they would be fully redirected to the original site instead of having it framed by the DiggBar service.

Since this change was made, it seemed that up until now, website owners and Digg users were happy with the how things were being handled. However, that changed once again on Sunday. TechCrunch noted that over the last couple of days, “clicking on a DiggBar shortlink will send anyone who isn’t already logged in to Digg to Digg.com’s list of comments about an article rather than the article itself.” You can see the example from their post below:

Later that day, Kevin Rose tweeted “just now reading the digg short url discussion, I was not aware this changed and will check in on it tomorrow (was on vacation for 2 weeks).” As a result, most people assumed that Digg was going to change its policy. However, yesterday, Jay Adelson wrote a post on the Digg blog about the DiggBar. In the post, he stated:

“Last week, we made a change that began directing non-logged in traffic generated from Digg short URLs to Digg story pages where they can view the comments and related content. In response to feedback, all short URLs that were generated *before* today will now behave as they did prior to last week’s change by taking the user directly to the source content. Logged-in Digg users will continue to be directed to the source content with the DiggBar (if they have it turned on). Of course, if the content has never been submitted to Digg, viewers will continue to be sent directly to the source.”

Although it’s obvious that Digg made this change to generate more traffic to their website (especially from people who aren’t currently Digg users), it doesn’t make for a good user experience at all considering that if you use one of these Digg links, the person who followed it would have to click your link and then click through the Digg page to even read the content of that link!